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What is the most effective eCommerce product / category structure?

We sell musical equipment, and we have been debating about how to structure our website in terms of products and categories.

These are our two options:

Each category page lists sub-categories and all of the products contained within each of these sub-categories, so e.g. the "Guitars" category page would contain links to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" as well as a big list of electric and acoustic guitars.

Each category page lists only its sub-categories, unless it is a "leaf" node, in which case it lists all the products, so e.g. category "Guitars" just has two links - to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" - and no products.

Option 2 means customers don't see products until they've decided which category they want, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but SEO-wise, which is best?

3 Responses

Option 1 would send more link authority (i.e. "link juice") to your specific product pages where the conversion will take place. This is also known as a flat site architecture (which is generally recommended) where there are fewer levels in your site hierarchy. As long as there are not an overwhelming number of products (which could hurt the user experience) option 1 is better for SEO in my opinion because the product pages will receive more link authority and have a better chance of ranking well in search results. If you have more than say about 20 products on each category page, then option 2 starts to seem more attractive for two reasons. First, the user experience is worsened as the page clutters up with too many options (see The Paradox of Choice) and also each additional link on the page will dilute the amount of link authority that is passed to each individual link.

If I understand, you'd like to stick to a silo structure and group each category >> products ?!

I've tested and worked with this issue so many times and here is what I find to work best for me

The first thing you need to do is create the best user experience you possibly can and that means if you feel like your visitors would like to see all products up front, you should definitely do that

however if you are concerned about keeping your site in clean silos you can still add "rel=nofollow" tags to all product links on the category page, and only after user selects a category show all products w/ do follow links

or if you really know your way you can go with option 1 and also have all products on the category page but in an iFrame, the same idea both, the user gets to see all your products but the SE still follows a clean structure where all products are where they should be

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